FORT MONMOUTH, N.J. -- The world will never be the same again. The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon Sept. 11 have changed everything; from our sense of security to how we get to work.

"There was a plan in place, but we went from 0 to 60 overnight, so to speak," said Lt. Col. Stephen N. Wood, Garrison commander, here. "By sheer coincidence we were scheduled to conduct "Timely Alert II," a force protection exercise on Sept. 11 and because of that, some of the concrete barriers were already in place."

Wood said people on post told him when they first saw live footage of the events unfolding at the World Trade Center, they thought it was some elaborate training video to accompany the exercise.

Firefighters here said others told them the same thing. "You really outdid yourself this time," a worker said to Captain "Jack" Rindt, training officer for the Fort Monmouth Fire Department. Rindt could only express his sorrow while he acknowledged that indeed, what people were seeing was not a movie, even if it looked like one.

Burlingame's 9-11 Pentagon plane not only hit the Pentagon that morning, it struck a Command and Control center for that morning's counterterrorism 'game' exercise, killing most, if not all, of the 'players'. We know this because Army personnel from Ft. Monmouth, New Jersey were on special duty assignment at the Pentagon that morning for an emergency response exercise and were killed when Burlingame's plane hit. Ft. Monmouth, New Jersey also happens to be the headquarters for White House/Presidential communications, including therefore probably also for Air Force One (this is discoverable) -- and recall the warning "Air Force One is next" and the 'secret code' which was called into the White House that morning which WH press secretary Ari Fleischer revealed as a means of explaining why Pres. Bush left Florida for a military base and did not return to the White House. This 'warning' was probably called into the White House, if true, by either the Ft. Monmouth White House communications headquarters and/or the Ft. Monmouth counterterrorism exercise 'game' players temporarily at the Pentagon that morning. To me, "Timely Alert II" appears to be distinct from the Pentagon's 9/11 "counterterrorism game," though personnel from Fort Monmouth - "the headquarters for White House/Presidential communications" - were involved in both.

So, how many drills, simulations and exercises does this make now? Six?

1577 Comments:

i am not disputing anything, just being rigorous.Pick a random year -- 2000, pick a random month -- June, pick a random day -- 21. Now type into Google: Training Exercises June 21, 2000 and what do you get? 1,260,000 pages in english. i will not sort through them to weave some story, but you get the point.BTW spooked, did you read Juan Cole yesterday about the treatened lawsuit? we need to support him.

bin'dare-- I must say the google exercise you suggested is not very rigorous.

First, I only got some 280,000 hits, not over a million-- but more importantly, most of the hits were on physical exercise and training-- not military. Second, the military exercises mentioned in the search weren't necessarily on that specific date.

If your point is that the military has a lot of training exercises, yes-- that is an important point. But I wonder how often is it when so many different exercises merge on the same day like on 9/11?

And moreover, the wargame scenario for 9/11 is important not so much because there were a lot of exercises that day, but because the exercises seemed to coincide with:1) the confused and delayed NORAD response to the hijackings2) actual events-- e.g. NORAD was running a live-fly hijacking exercise on 9/113) the 9/11 catastrophe itself-- personnel for the exercises just happened to be in place to deal with the crises, e.g. Tripod II and this Timely Alert exercise.

"I only got some 280,000 hits" !!!Even that is enough whole cloth. The rigor is not in using Google, the rigor is in being objective, letting the data inform you, etc etc. Like i said, i am not disputing anything (Crossing the Rubicon is excellently reasoned), your working hypothesis that these additional training exercises are related to the events of 911 is a legitimate working hypothesis. Go with it, but rigorously shake it, question it, etc etc. The Google exercise is a reminder of the myriad of other working hypotheses yet to be worked on.

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Speaking of intuition, over the years I have been puzzled about about a timing issue that I observed and I wonder how many other former soldiers observed on the day that JFK was assasinated. I was stationed in Germany with a nuclear missile unit near the Czech border. We were deployed on an alert at 6:30 PM on 11-22-63 right after the evening meal. After occupying our emergency firing position, perhaps 30 minutes after the alert was sounded, I went ahead and set up our perimeter defense with my squad,(I was the machine gun sergeant for the unit). After getting set up I wandered over to the communication truck to see what the heck was up. The communication truck had wireless teletype machines to monitor communications with our higher headquarters to receive orders etc. One of the machines was monitoring Associated Press, since the other one was monitoring headquarters. After a while, I heard a commotion, 5 dings in a row. The comm technicion hollared that there were shots fired in Dallas at the president. I believe that this flash message at the time, about 7:30 PM, was a contemporaneous report of the assasination, one hour after we were deployed to our emergency firing position with nuclear missiles. There is seven hour difference between Dallas and Germany. That means we were deployed one hour before the assasination. Someone in Washington was able to see the future. Any other reports of this early deployments?